The Blue (The Complete Novel) Read Free Page A

scanning for signs of the creature’s silhouette on the rim of the floe where it might be waiting to pounce on me, and start to examine the boat. I step inside and kick the bags around but don’t see a single crack. No damaged wood. What do you mean it’s split? I ask. Russell slowly leaves the tent and walks around to the stern of the boat. He bends down and shovels away a pile of snow and tells me to come look. When I get around, I see the split. Clear as day. About a foot down on the hull, right where she’d sit in the water, if she ever met the water again.
     
    Before I started the fishing rod, he says, when I found out about the food, I tried to dig her out. Thought we might try to drag her to some open sea somewhere past the Pancake. But the pressure must have broken her up when the ice locked in.
                I curse as loud as I can and watch the ghost of the blue. It’s about gone, a shadow, its bright show of hope silenced until tomorrow morning. And then Russell tells me what our final plan has to be.
     
    The way I see it now, we have to start out. We’re healed up enough now, he tells me. But all I can do is reply in emptiness, telling him that there’s nowhere to go to—not without the boat. That we’re walking to nothing, even if we get to the blue. The ice will break apart and we’ll drown. And the forced smile on Russell’s face vanishes, and he reveals his true intentions at last.
                “We’re going to die there then. Under a blue sky. With sun falling down on us and nothing else. Nothing else. Because that’s all we have left in the world to do. Die how we want to,” he says. He stares into my eyes, and I can see the veneer burning there, as bright as ever, even while the imaginary bit of hope he’s been carrying around the past few days evaporates.
     
    I see in his eyes what it’s come down to for him. Just a better place to die. That we can choose our own place to die, and do it on our own terms. Not the ice’s, not the rain’s, not the cold’s and the wet’s. Our own terms. It’s so horrible I can’t accept it. But after the silence, where neither of us say anything, it settles over me like an absolute truth. Like I’ve known this all along. And the real veneer has been hope itself. And now that we’ve gotten rid of that, we can die free.
                He’s right. It’s enough to push on for. One last fuck you to a world that couldn’t kill us after all, even with all its years of unending effort. I push myself into his chest and wrap myself around him and tell him I don’t want to die. Our own making or not, I don’t want to. But he doesn’t back down from reality for me this time—he knows it’s the only comfort we have left, and he lets me have it: “Not here. Under the sun, okay?” he says. He waits until I nod my head so that he knows I’m with him. All the way. Until the end. And I start to think about it—that if we can all die together, it would be alright. We wouldn’t have to know or wonder or think that anyone’s suffering anymore. Under the warm and dry sunlight. As the ice breaks away, out from under us. But we can’t let the ocean do it, I tell him. And all I can see in the back of my head are the guns, and that if anything’s going to take us out, it’ll be them. Something we have control over. Not the ocean, not the exposure. We can’t let them take us in the end. From over Russell’s shoulder I see Voley’s shadow moving inside the tent. He shifts onto his hind legs to get a better view of us. Trying to figure out what the heck we’re doing out past dark. Sitting in the cold. Already he’s used to the routine on the ice. And he wants us to head back to the stove to cuddle up with him.
     
    You have first watch tonight, he tells me. Together we walk back to the tent, like nothing’s changed. Everything that I cling to is finally changed, and I push it away just as fast as I accept it and turn to the